Real Time Communications Featured Article

SAP's Nayyar: CRM is Dead; Omnichannel is Where It's At

No longer should CRM systems be viewed solely as lead generation tools, says Nayaki Nayyar, senior vice president of SAP Cloud, CRM and Integration. Instead, she says, CRM solutions are morphing into something bigger that can enable organizations to engage with customers via multiple channels throughout the customer lifecycle.

Nayyar is at GENBAND Perspectives14 this week in Orlando spreading that message. She’ll be giving a keynote titled, “The Future of Customer Engagement,” here this afternoon.

The future of customer engagement, Nayyar explains, involves enabling a customer and a company to interact using multiple channels – including chat, the contact center, social networks, video, and interactive websites – and delivers an all-encompassing view of each customer to the company so its staff can better understand that customer, and his or her experience to date with the organization.

While there’s been lots of talk in recent years about multichannel or omnichannel customer service, most companies today continue to deliver inconsistent experiences among channels. However, says Nayyar, there are some great success stories.

Nespresso is one such example, she says.

Here she offers an example of a woman named Morgan who tweets to the company that she’s in the market for a new coffee maker. Nespresso immediately responds to her via Twitter, providing guidance on a product to meet her needs and offering a discount on it. When Morgan walks into the store to purchase the coffee maker, she is recognized and the offer appears on her mobile phone. And when Morgan returns home and decides to visit the Nespresso website to see what beverage pods are available for her new coffee maker, Nespresso offers a suggestion on what she might consider and invites her to interact in real time with an online assistant.

If Morgan elects to click to connect with a customer service representative, that rep is provided with a screen pop showing who is calling, as well as Morgan’s social profile, her purchase history, any of her orders that are pending, and other relevant details.

“In this journey you see Morgan went through multiple channels” seamlessly, says Nayyar.

Of course, this is just one example of what’s possible – in customer service, sales, or marketing – when companies view customers as whole people instead of individual interactions.